Groundhog Day

By now, we all know that Puxatony Phil saw his shadow today.  Looks like another 6 weeks of winter - even if it really hasn't started this year.

In Pre-K we had fun learning about ground hogs, shadows and making predictions.  First we got some background knowledge by reading two books.

The Groundhog book was written by blogger Kathleen Pederson for her readers.  See more on her Growing Kinders Blog.

Groundhog Weather School is a funny book about Professor Groundhog and his school that trains groundhogs about weather.  This book gave us more information about groundhogs and some good laughs.

After learning that Puxatony Phil forecasts the weather according to his shadow, we made predictions about what he would see when he came out of his burrow.  We used weather clues by looking out the window.  12 of us thought he would see his shadow and 3 of us thought he wouldn't.  There must have been sun in Pennsylvania, because there wasn't any in Massachusetts this morning. ;)  We recorded our predictions and information that we learned about groundhogs on our morning message board.

Then we got to experiment making shadows of our own.  To make a screen, we draped a white sheet over two classroom chairs and gave the children a flashlight.  They took right too shadow making by putting their hands in front of the light and items from the classroom.

Finally, some of the children documented our discussions about shadows.  Here is a picture of a mountain climber and his shadow, which is on the other side of the mountain in black.  You can see the sun behind the mountain climber.  I love the knowledge this simple picture depicts.